1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of network applications such as applications on the Internet, in particular to a method and system to allow users to interface to various network services without a strict service directed user interface.
2. Description of the Related Art
The world wide web (WWW), specifically through applications has allowed for numerous services to be provided. Services include photo sharing web sites, researching databases, accessing public library catalogs, and electronic commerce (e-commerce). Web site services continue to evolve to allow greater interaction between users, providers of services and products, and web sites that allow groups to communicate. E-commerce has grown from consumers merely visiting a commercial web-site and ordering goods or services by entering account and or credit card information to interactive communication between consumers and web-sites. Service frameworks provide for interaction between groups in a network or the Internet. Service frameworks allow the Internet to evolve from a collection of web sites accessed by a personal computer to a network of interconnected services that work together to solve problems, perform tasks, or meet a need. Systems and services will be able to have intelligent communications with or without the need for user intervention. Service frameworks include E-speak™ developed by the Hewlett Packard Corporation and Enterprise Java Beans™ developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Service frameworks define a uniform services interface or application programming interfaces (API), and uniform services interaction such as the E-speak™ engine allow services to dynamically interact to discover, negotiate, broker and compose themselves to solve a business to business, or business to consumer service request. Most service interfaces are defined by an extensible mark-up language (XML) scheme or an XML interface.
Application programs (applications) that once controlled various functions and routines were made up of large pervasive sections of code, where one user interface could suffice. Applications are now seen as a collection of individual standalone services that are distributed over a network such as the Internet and combined together by a web application to form a useful end user service. This allows for code reuse, greater flexibility, and ease of maintenance. Individual applications, however, may or may not have proper user interfaces that allow a user to communicate to services.
An application does provide a level of user interface to and interaction with a user while having various services operating in the background. In addition, some services need a minimum level of interaction with a user through a user interface.
Service frameworks typically provide an application programming interface model that does not allow individual services to provide user interfaces to the user, or otherwise directly interact with the user. Problems therefore can arise with the basic need to provide an interface between services and users.
Regardless of the service framework that is chosen, services have the ability to persist in their state or setting, or continue to maintain state. In addition, regardless of the service framework, each service will have a unique session identifier (ID) to allow interaction between services.
A need has been felt for a method and a system, in particular a service framework that allows services that do not have a user interface (UI) to communicate with a user through an appropriate UI. The service framework should be easy to use, extensible, and allow service developers to provide user interaction to their services.